Hello, This is Chris Anderson, the guy who gets to run. Ted, you're about to hear a talk from 10 2019 featuring the New York Times columnist David Brooks. If his way of thinking appeals to you, invite you to take a listen to my podcast, the Ted interview where David and I spend an hour diving deeper into the ideas you're about to hear. We talk, for example, about how individual ism has created a crisis of isolation on what he thinks the fix might be. That's the tenant. Few on apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. Support for Ted is brought to you by Wells Fargo. This is a commitment to better banking. This is Wells Fargo

s. So we all have bad seasons in life. Uh, and I had one in 2013. My marriage had just ended, and I was humiliated by that failed commitment. My kids had left home for college or we're leaving. I grew up mostly in the conservative one movement, but conservatism had changed, so I'd lost a lot of those friends, too. And so what? I did this. I lived alone in an apartment on. I just worked. If you open the kitchen drawers where there should have been utensils. There were posted notes.

If you open the other drawers where the shipment plates. I had envelopes. Uh, I had work friends, weekday friends, but didn't have weekend friends. And so my weekends with these long howling silences and I was lonely and loneliness unexpectedly came to me in the form of um, it felt like fear burning in my stomach. And I felt a little like drunkenness, just making bad decisions or just fluidity, lack of solidity. And the painful part of that moment was the awareness that the emptiness in my apartment was just reflective of the emptiness of myself and that had fallen for some of the lives that our culture tells us. The first lie is that career success is fulfilling. I've had a fair bit of career success, and I found that helps me avoid the shame I would feel if I felt myself a failure. But it hasn't given me any positive good.

The second line is I can make myself happy that if I just win one more victory, lose £15 do a little more yoga, I'll get happy and that's the lie of self sufficiency. But does anybody on their deathbed will tell you the things that makes people happy? Is the deep relationships of life the losing of self sufficiency? The third lie is the lie of the meritocracy. The message of the meritocracy is you are Will you accomplish? The myth of the meritocracy is you can earn dignity by attaching yourself this prestigious brands. The emotion of the meritocracy is conditional. Love you can earn your way to love. The anthropology of the meritocracy is you're not a soul to be purified. You're a set of skills to be maximized. And the evil of the meritocracy is that people who have achieved a little more than others are actually worth a little more than others. And so the wages of sin Herson and my sins with sense of omission, not reaching out feelings show for my friend's evasion, avoiding conflict.

And the weird thing was that as I was falling in the Valley, it was a valley of disconnection. A lot of other people were doing that too on, and that's sort of the secret to my career. A lot of the things that happened me are always happened to a lot of other people. I'm a very average person with above average communication skills. And so I was detached. And at the same time a lot of other people were detached and isolated. Ends fragments it from each other. 35% of Americans over 45 a chronically lonely only 8% of Americans report having meaningful conversation with their neighbours. Only 32% of Americans say they trust their neighbors, and only 18% of millennials, the fastest growing political parties unaffiliated the fastest growing religious movement is unaffiliated depression Rates arising. Mental health problems. Air rising suicide rate has risen 30% since 1999 for teen suicides. In the last several years,

the suicide rate has risen by 70%. 45,000 Americans kill themselves every year. 72,000 die from opiate addictions. Life expectancy is falling, not rising. So what I mean to tell you, I came here. I flew out here to say that we have an economic crisis. We've environmental crisis. We've little crisis. We also have a social and relation. All crisis were in the valley, were fragmented from each other. We've got cascades of lies coming out of Washington were in the valley. And so I've spent the last five years. How do you get out of the Valley?

And the Greeks used to say, You suffer your way to risk wisdom. And from that dark period where I started, I've had a few realizations. The first is freedom sucks. Economic freedom is okay. Political freedom is great. Social freedom sucks. The UN rooted man is Theodry. If man, the unloaded man is the one remembered man because he's uncommitted to things, Freedom is not a river. It's not a notion you want to swim in its wherever you want to get across so you could commit and plant yourself on the other side. The second thing I learned is when you have one of those bad moments in life, you can either be broken or you can be broken open, and we all know people who are broken.

They've endured some pain or grief. They get smaller, that angry or resentful. They lash out as the saying is. Pain that is not transformed gets transmitted, but other people are broken open sufferings. Greats power is that it's an interruption of life. It reminds you you're not the person you thought you were, the theologian Paul Tillich said. What suffering does is it carve should of what you thought was the floor of the basement of your soul, and it carves through that, revealing a cavity below and a car through that revealing a cavity below. You realize their depths of yourself you never anticipated, and only spiritually and relational food will fill those deaths. And when you get down there, you get out of the head of the ego and you get into the heart.

The desire in heart. The idea that what we really yearn for is longing and love for another, the kind of thing that Louise Bernier described in his book Captain Corelli's Mandolin. He's an old guy talking to his daughter about his relationship with his late wife, and the old guy says love itself is whatever is left over when being in love has burned away. And this book is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it. We had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty Boston's had fallen from our branches, we discovered that we're one tree and not to. That's what the heart yearns for. The second thing you discover is your soul. No, I don't ask you to believe in God or not believe in God, but I do ask you to believe that there's a piece of you that has no shape, size,

color or wait, but that gives you infinite dignity and value. Rich and successful people don't have more of this than less successful people. Slavery is wrong because it's an obliteration of another soul. Rape is not just attack on a much of physical molecules. It's an attempt to insult another person's soul. And what the soul does is it yearns for righteousness. The heart yearns for fusion with another, the soul yearns for righteousness. And that led to my third realization, which I borrowed from Einstein. The problem you were, you have. It's not gonna be solved at the level of consciousness on which you created it. You have to expand to a different level of consciousness. So what do you do?

Well, the first thing you do you throw throw yourselves on your friends and your deeper conversations have you ever had before? But the second thing you Do you have to go out alone into the wilderness. You go out into that place where there's nobody there to perform and the ego has nothing to do and it crumbles. And only then are you capable of being loved. I'm a friend. Ooh, Who said dumb that when her daughter was born, she realized that she loved her more than evolution required. And I've always loved that because it talks about the piece that said, the deep of ourselves, our un explicable care for one another, and when you touch that spot, you're ready to be rescued. The hard thing about when you're in the valley is that you can't climb out. Somebody has to reach in and pull you out.

It happened to me. I got luckily invited over the house by a couple of Kathy and David. And they were, Ah, uh, they had a kid in the D. C. Public schools named Santi. Santi had a friend who needed a place to stay because his mom had some health issues. And then that kid had a friend. That kid had a friend in that kid, had a friend when he went to their house six years ago, I walked in the door. There's like 25 around the kitchen table, whole bunch sleeping on the downstairs in the basement. I reach out to introduce myself to a kid,

and he says, We don't really shake hands here. We just hug here and I'm not the hunkiest guy in the face of the Earth. But I've been going back to that home every Thursday night when I'm in town and just hugging all those kids and what they demand intimacy. They demand that you behave in a way where you're showing all the way up and they teach you a new way to live, which is the cure for all the ills of our culture, which is a way of direct, really putting relationship first, not as a word, Justus a word, but as a reality. And the beautiful thing is, these communities are everywhere. I serve something about the Aspen Institute called We've the Social Fabric. This is our logo here, and we'll pop into a place and we find Weaver's anywhere everywhere.

We find people like Aisha Butler, who grew up in lived in Chicago and Angle. We're in a tough neighborhood and she was about to move because it was so dangerous. Ah, and she looked across the street and she saw two little girls playing an empty lot with broken bottles. And she turned to her husband and she said, We're not leaving. We're not gonna be just another family that abandoned that. And she Googled volunteer in Englewood. And now she runs Rage, the big community organization there. Some of these people have had tough valleys. I met a woman named Sarah in Ohio who came home from an antique ing trip and found that her husband had killed himself then and their two kids. She now runs a farm free pharmacy. She volunteers in the community. She helped women's cope with violence.

She teaches. She told me I grew from this experience because I was angry. I was gonna fight back against what he tried to do to me by making a difference in the world. See, he didn't kill him to kill me. My response to him is whatever you meant to do to me. Screw you. You're not going to do it. These weavers are not living in individualistic life. They're living a relation ist life. They have a different set of values. They have moral motivations. They vocational certitude. They have planted themselves down. I met a guy in Youngstown, Ohio,

just held up a sign in the town square. Defend Youngstown. They have radical mutuality, and they're geniuses that relationship. There's a woman named Mary Gordon who runs typical roots of empathy, and what they do is they take a bunch of kids in eighth grade class. They put a mom and an infant, and then the kids. Students have to guess what? The infinite thinking to teach empathy. There's one kid in the class who was bigger than the rest because he'd been held back in through the foster care system, seen his mom get killed, and he wanted to hold the baby. And the mom was nervous. Does he look big and scary? But she let this kid Darren hold the baby.

He held it, and he was great with it. It gave the baby back and started asking questions about parenthood, and his final question was, If nobody has ever loved you, do you think you could be a good father? And so what roots of empathy does is they reach down and grab people out of the valley, and that's what weavers are doing. Some of them switched jobs. They, some of them, stay in their same jobs. But one thing's they have an intensity to them. I read this E. O. Wilson wrote a great book called Naturalist about his his,

uh, his childhood. And when he was seven, his parents were divorcing, uh, and they sent it to Paradise Beach in North Florida, and he never seen the ocean before, and he'd never seen a jellyfish before, he wrote. The creature was astonishing. It existed beyond my imagination. He was sitting on the dock one day and he saw a stingray float beneath his feet, and at that moment a naturalist was born in the awe and wonder. And he makes this observation that when your child you see animals that twice the size, as you do as as an adult, and that has always impressed me because it's a what we want his kids is that moral intensity to be totally given ourselves over to something and to find that level of vocation.

And when you were around these weavers, they see other people at twice the size is normal vehicle, they see deeper into them, and what they see is joy on the first mountain of our life. When we're shooting for our career, we, uh we should for happiness and happiness is good. It's It's the expansion of self. You win a victory, you have. You, uh, get a promotion. Your team wins the Super Bowl. You're happy. Joy is not the expansion of self.

It's the dissolving of self. It's the moment when the skin barrier disappears between the mother and her child. It's the moment when the naturalist fields just free in nature. It's the moment we're so lost in your work or a cause you have totally self or gotten. Enjoy is a betterthan game for than happiness. I collect passages of joy of people when they lose it. One of my favorite is from Zadie Smith. In 1999 she was in a London nightclub, looking for friends, wondering where a handbag was, and suddenly, as she writes, a rail thin man with enormous eyes reached across a sea of bodies. From my hand, he kept asking me the same thing over and over. Are you feeling it?

My ridiculous heels were killing me. I was terrified. I might die. Yet I felt simultaneously overwhelmed with light that can I kick. It should happening playing on this precise moment in the history of world on the sound system, and it was now morphing into teen spirit. I took the man's hand. The top of my head blew away. We danced, we danced, we gave ourselves up to joy. And so what? I'm trying to describe his two different live mindsets, the first mountain mindset, which is about individual happiness and career success. And it's a good mind set.

Nothing instant. But we're in a national valley because we don't have the other mindset to balance it. We no longer feel good about ourselves as a people. We've lost our defining faith in our future. We don't see each other deeply. We don't treat each other as well, and we need a lot of changes. We need economic change and environmental chains, but we also need a cultural and relation or revolution. You need to name the language of a recovered society, and to me, the Weavers have found that language. My theory of social change is it society changes when a small group of people find a better way to live, and the rest of us copy them. And these weavers have found a better way to live, and you don't have to theorize about it.

They're out there as community builders all around the country. We just have to shift our lives a little. So we can say, Well, I'm a weaver, were a weaver. And if we do that, the whole inside ourselves gets filled. But more important, the social unity gets repaired. Thank you very much.

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